Crossing the Boundaries of Gender: Care Experiences Among Bolivian Aymara Migrant Women in the Andean Triple-Border

Introduction

In 2019, we carried out an anthropological case study on the experience of Bolivian Aymara migrant women in the Chilean territories of the Andean Triple-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia). We focused on agricultural workers or traders of rural products who live in the Azapa Valley in Arica (Chile).

The Andean Triple-border is found in the mountainous territories of the Atacama Desert. The tripartite landmark that indicates the Triple-border is 4,115 m.a.s.l. and divides the municipalities of three Aymara villages: Visviri (Chile), Charaña (Bolivia), and Ancomarca (Peru). However, its sphere of influence reaches along a route that connects these villages to urban centers and rural localities in the departments La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí (Bolivia), and the Pacific coast: especially the cities of Arica (Chile) and Tacna (Peru).

Arica is the capital of the Arica and Parinacota Region, Chile's northernmost administrative unity. Together with the Tarapacá Region (capital Iquique) and Antofagasta Region (capital Antofagasta), it makes up the area known as the Chilean “Great North,” a territory annexed after the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). Arica is surrounded by two large valleys, Azapa and Lluta (Figure 1), important agricultural oases in the middle of the world's driest desert. This area is historically crossed by human, commercial, and transhuman routes: an axis of encounters between peoples and nations. It was historically inhabited by various ethnic groups and governed by different state structures: (1) the Tiwanaku Empire (700–1250 AD), (2) the Incan Empire (1470–1532 AD), (3) the Spanish colonial domination (1532–1824 AD), (4) the Peruvian Republic (1824–1880 AD), (5) the litigious occupation by the Chilean army (1880–1929), and (6) the Republic of Chile (from 1929 onwards).

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Figure 1.

Arica and Parinacota Region: Azapa and Lluta Valleys (Chile) and the Andean Triple-border landmark. Source: Drawn by Paulo Contreras for Fondecyt Project 1190056.

In the twentieth century, agriculture in Arica's valleys was affected by Aymara Indigenous migration from the high plains and mountainous sectors towards the coastal cities. ¹ This Indigenous population was dedicated to rural work in the valleys and was the protagonist in the creation of Arica's Agricultural Market at the end of the seventies, which was crucial for their insertion into commercial and transport work. To date, this market is made up of many Aymara traders, owners, and workers of both sexes (from Chile, Peru, and Bolivia).

From the nineties onwards, a new expansive cycle of the Chilean mining industry kicked off, with a growing demand for male labor in the regions of Tarapacá and Antofagasta. ² The male Chilean population abandoned work in the valleys to join the mining industry. Given that there were no sizeable mining projects in Arica and Parinacota, this region specialized in supplying food to the other cities. This intensified the Indigenous migration (Aymara and Quechua) from Peru and Bolivia towards Arica's valleys. ³ By the end of 2019, international migrants made up 11.5 percent of Arica and Parinacota's total population, ranking it fourth among Chile's regions in terms of migrant density. ⁴ The Bolivian community is the most numerous making up 38.5 percent of regional migrants, followed by Peruvians with 35.8 percent. Women accounted for around 55 percent of the total regional migrants, and they were also the majority in the Bolivian community. ⁵ Specifically, in Azapa, Aymara migrant families from Peru and Bolivia make up 90 percent of the settled population. They live on agricultural plots, in improvised houses with dirt floors, no electricity, or running water.

The preeminence of Bolivian migration in Arica, their importance for the agricultural labor market, and the feminization of this group led us to focus our study on Bolivian women. The labor insertion of Bolivian women in paid domestic and care work in the Chilean Norte Grande has been researched in recent years. ⁶ Several works have observed the difficulties these female migrants experienced accessing citizenship. ⁷ However, their rural insertion and the ethnic dimension of their labor and family experience in Arica were less studied aspects. On the other hand, there is prolific anthropological literature on gender relations in Aymara families in these territories which have shed light on the persistence of patterns of gender inequality that accompany the female Aymara trajectories. ⁸

In this study, we draw on these research fields, putting them in dialogue with a third: the international literature on intersectionality and care in female transnational and transborder migration. An important part of this literature covers the experience of women from Southern countries in the global North. We seek to establish whether the categories and analyses for different contexts (and focusing on female migrations of other origins) can be applied to the transborder mobilities of Aymara women, for whom displacements are articulated with ethnic patterns of gender division of labor. Therefore, this article's objective is to test the assumptions of the international literature on the relationship between gender inequalities, care, and migration, thus inquiring about their applicability in these territories.

Our analytical focus is on the migrant women’s productive and reproductive overloads, and the articulation of female care chains that sustain transborder mobilities. By drawing on the women's narratives, we will show how they suffer from the intersectionality of national borders and the boundaries of gender.

Using ethnographic methodology, we carried out four fieldwork visits to Arica in 2019 (in March, April, May, and September), focusing on the Azapa Valley and Arica's Agricultural Market. We made systematic recordings in field diaries, more than two thousand photographs, and fifty ethnographic videos. In addition, we carried out thirty life-history interviews with migrant women. Table 1 shows the interviewees’ profiles. All of them have anonymity and are identified by pseudonyms or initials they chose.

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Table 1.

Profile of the Women Interviewed.

No	Pseudonym/ INitials	Nationality	Age (years)	Occupation	Marital status	Residence
1	Casimira	Bolivian	39	Agricultural and household goods seller	Married	Azapa Valley
2	Joana	Bolivian	24	Serves public in phone call shop	Single	Arica
3	Paloma	Bolivian	56	Garlic seller in the Agricultural and Fishing Market of Arica	Married	Arica
4	Muñequita Mía	Bolivian	22	Unpaid reproductive work: housewife	Lives with partner	Azapa Valley
5	XFP	Bolivian	24	Agricultural worker	Lives with partner	Azapa Valley
6	Clavel	Bolivian	27	Agricultural worker	Married	Azapa Valley
7	Rosi	Bolivian	32	Agricultural worker	Separated	Azapa Valley
8	Priscila	Bolivian	45	Hairdresser	Separated	Arica
9	Shanita	Bolivian	49	Businesswoman	Married	Arica
10	Marcela	Bolivian	43	Sweet seller	Married	Arica
11	FAM	Bolivian	N/G	Humitas (Native Pre-Hispanic corn dough dish) seller	Married	Arica
12	MQM	Bolivian	38	Unpaid reproductive work: housewife	Lives with partner	Azapa Valley
13	XCM	Bolivian	N/G	Businesswoman	Married	Arica
14	Basilia	Bolivian	32	Agricultural worker	Married	Azapa Valley
15	Neni	Bolivian	29	Agricultural worker	Married	Azapa Valley
16	EH	Bolivian	29	Hairdresser	Single	Arica
17	Romualda	Chilean/Bolivian	45	Owner of family plot of land and employer	Married	Azapa Valley
18	Jasmin	Bolivian	37	Agricultural worker	Separated	Azapa Valley
19	Diana	Bolivian	34	Agricultural worker	Married	Azapa Valley
20	MB	Bolivian	61	Owner of handcraft stalls	Married	Arica
21	Rosa	Bolivian	N/G	Agricultural worker in tomato box factory	Married	Azapa Valley
22	Silvia	Bolivian	N/G	Agricultural worker in tomato box factory	Married	Azapa Valley
23	Maira	Bolivian	N/G	Agricultural worker in tomato box factory	Married	Azapa Valley
24	Maite	Bolivian	N/G	Agricultural worker in tomato box factory	Married	Azapa Valley
25	JM	Bolivian	69	Owner of vegetable stand	Married	Arica
26	MMQ	Bolivian/Chilean	70	Seller of goods for Aymara rituals	Separated	Arica
27	JMQ	Bolivian/Chilean	61	Seller of goods for Aymara rituals	Separated	Arica
28	AMQ	Bolivian	37	Agricultural worker	Married	Azapa Valley
29	MMC	Bolivian	N/G	Market seller	Married	Arica
30	Gladys	Bolivian	28	Agricultural worker	Lives with partner	Arica

Source: Compiled using the ethnographic material gathered in Fondecyt Project 1190056.

The interviewed women were aged between twenty-two and seventy years old. Twenty-one of them had had access to formal education, two did not go to school, and the other seven gave no information on this issue. Five of those who had accessed formal education did not finish primary school, one finished it, six did not finish secondary studies, while five did so, and one had unfinished university studies. Two of the women answered that they had studied, but they gave no further details. Twenty-seven of the women held only Bolivian nationality; three had double nationality: Bolivian and Chilean.

The majority came from big families with an average of six siblings. At the same time, the women had an average of 2.6 children per woman, showing a reduction in fertility rate compared with their mothers’ generation. Nineteen interviewees declared they were married (63 percent), while five stated they had separated (16.7 percent). Four said they lived with a partner (13.3 percent), and two were single (6.7 percent).

Twenty-two of them mentioned they were born in rural communities (73.3 percent) and three in urban areas (10 percent). Five gave no information on this issue. Seventeen women were born and grew up in the Department of La Paz (56.7 percent), five did so in the Department of Oruro (16.7 percent), three were from Santa Cruz (10 percent), two were from Cochabamba (6.7 percent). Two were born in Arica (6.7 percent). Note that twenty-nine of the interviewees self-identified as “Aymara women,” only one woman did not identify as Indigenous.

We will start our analysis of these women's testimonies by presenting the theoretical frameworks of our study: the debates on the gender division of labor, intersectionality, and care in the experience of female migrants. We complement these perspectives with research on the gender inequalities found in Aymara families. The following three sections analyze the empirical data, focusing on (1) the contradictions implied by the gender mandate for the women interviewed; (2) their overload; and (3) the female chains the women articulate. In our conclusions, we propose a resizing of some of the concepts in international female migration studies to provide them with analytical precision in contexts where women's mobility experiences are articulated from ethnic kinship structuring.

Theoretical Frameworks

Until the mid-twentieth century, there was a certain consensus in sociocultural anthropology that human groups establish strategic and mutualistic forms of cooperation, promoting the labor specialization of persons and the subsequent exchange of the results of their work. ⁹ When “behavioral differences involve cooperative specialization in economic production or reproduction, we usually refer to the outcome as a division of labor.” ¹⁰ The sexual division of labor is prototypical of patriarchies, which demarcates the hierarchical separation of male labor from female labor, and was considered a primordial form of labor organization in human societies.

In these arguments, the concept of patriarchal systems (or patriarchates) alludes to kinship structures in which relationships between family members are established according to the power of the pater familiae. These are known as patrilineal when the succession of property, honor, or power is transferred between the male figures. ¹¹ Patriarchies usually have a patrilocal character: when women marry, they are obliged to move to the community or property of their husbands because they are dispossessed of inheritance, and their exchange seals the patriarchs of different groups. These modes of organization presuppose the violent appropriation of women and configure a regime of power that marginalizes the female and establishes material, symbolic, psychological, moral, and physical forms of domination. ¹²

However, in classical anthropology, descriptions of the sexual division of labor in patriarchies have prevailed with a stereotypical differentiation between public space (a sign of male power and locus of men's work) and private space (where women are enclosed, limited by patriarchal power). ¹³ In the domestic sphere, women are responsible for social reproduction work: all tasks related to people (children, youth, and the elderly), objects, animals, and environments that allow for the continuity of social life. Productive work—which allows for the expansion of material goods and infrastructure—is controlled by men. Beyond this schematic vision, in most patriarchal societies, women share the burden of productive tasks with men, but they carry out a great part of the reproductive tasks, which are undervalued.

These patterns consolidate a female overload and are configured from gender mandates. In anthropological terms, gender is defined as the sociocultural construction of biological sexual differences, ¹⁴ which articulate categorizations “of persons, artifacts, events, sequences, and so on which draw upon sexual imagery—upon the ways in which the distinctiveness of male and female characteristics make concrete people's ideas about the nature of social relationships.” ¹⁵ Gender mandates constitute the cultural schemes of perception that derive from these categorizations and are internalized through language, performances, customs, and socially established practices. ¹⁶ Gradually, these perceptions are taken as “natural” realities; they permeate family relationships, producing dispositions: psychological tendencies or inclinations that drive the realization of certain practices to the detriment of others. ¹⁷

In the last decade, feminist anthropologists have denounced that the classic definitions of the sexual division of labor are insufficient. What is at stake in these organizations of social tasks is not the “sexes” in their biological configuration, but the way they are culturally conceived:

It is anachronistic to speak of the sexual division of labor. This is not to deny incontrovertible realities; undoubtedly, human males are generally taller, more corpulent, and stockier than human females, and their procreative process takes place outside their bodies. However, the obvious set of bio-sexual distinctions does not produce the existing occupational segregation. In other words, what determines labor inequality are cultural beliefs about “what is normal” for men and women, which, moreover, are internalized in the psyche […]. Today, with their excessive workloads distributed very unevenly for both women and men, this distribution is one of the most problematic configurations. Moreover, this unequal allocation, in addition to making it impossible to reconcile family and work, also conditions the economic system and sustains a social model that produces conflicts of various kinds. ¹⁸

Following Lamas, ¹⁹ we adhere to the concept of the gender division of labor and consider that this is presented in diverse, intersectional, and frequently contradictory ways. With “intersectionality,” we allude to the fact that the intersection between markers that configure vulnerability (class, race, ethnicity, gender, and age) magnifies the experience of social exclusion. ²⁰ The applicability of the concept to the mobilities of transborder women requires precision since their experiences are simultaneously crossed by the borders of Nation-states and by the boundaries of the social and political hierarchies of each space. ²¹ To understand female border mobilities, one must consider “the social positioning or situatedness of the social agents whose experiences, reasoning, and action are shaped by and contribute to shaping the interplay of borders and boundaries.” ²² Furthermore,

Race, class, and gender constitute the classical triad of categories included in intersectional analyses. ²³ More recent feminist scholarship has extended the list of categories that can contribute to shaping an individual's position in society (like sexuality, age, migration and so on). ²⁴ Amelina ²⁵ argues that an intersectional perspective highlights the interplay and mutual shaping of various types of boundaries. It, therefore, lends itself to analyzing multiple systems of classification. By means of categorization, specific categorical distinctions are transformed into unequal life opportunities.^26,27

In this study, we will see how Bolivian migrant women experience overlapping borders and boundaries and seek out strategies to cope with violations and overloads. By recognizing the power conflicts framed by gender in the formation of their families, “we suspect that not all differences in labor are patterned by cooperative mutualism or based solely on considerations of economic efficiency.” ²⁸ The divisions of labor between genders are more dynamic, complex, interconnected, and contextual than the binarism of the sexual perspective allows us to see. It is necessary to observe the concrete—situational—form of organizing social work while simultaneously investigating its configurations in life trajectories and gender mandates. ²⁹

Here we come to another core category: care. The concept refers to a diversity of practices: involving (1) direct help to people (bathing and feeding); (2) emotional care (talking and consoling); (3) essential services for the last two categories (buying food and paying bills); and (4) maintenance of living spaces (cleaning and repairing). Another activity consists of fostering family and community relationships (kinship work). Defining care implies talking about the parties involved (those who receive it and those who give it). In these relationships, transversalities and reciprocities are established, which may have a hierarchical nature. The aim is to overcome the “dependence/independence” dichotomy and emphasize that everyone is interdependent. Care intermingles the “material” and the “immaterial,” “the mercantile” with the “non-mercantile.” It is not restricted to households: it crosses “the public” and “the private.” In contemporary patriarchal societies, despite their contextual particularities, care is organized around networks of women, inside and outside households, paid or unpaid, in nuclear or extended families, in one country or among several. The polysemy and complexity of the term “care” reflect the different meanings and practices that the act of caring embodies in different contexts; however, female overload is a constant in different societies and cultural groups.

In migration studies, the category has gained prominence since the nineties. Its application revealed that the migratory condition constitutes an axis of social inequality that overlaps with gender, kinship, social class, and ethnicity. Female migration leads to the cross-cultural and trans-territorial circulation of care.

Authors studying the economic aspects of the South-North international migration of women proposed the concept of global care chains at the beginning of the twentieth century. ³⁰ A decade later, and from the European and North American recipient countries, the notion of circulation of care emerged ³¹ being focused on kinship relations and the moral economies of care. ³² These approaches present confluences and divergences.

Parreñas ³³ points out that the concept of global chains of care was first used by Hochschild referring to “a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring.” ³⁴ This focus problematized the strategies used to solve the care crisis in the core countries of capitalism. ³⁵ The increase in female participation in the labor market, family transformations, the increase in life expectancy, and the neoliberal reduction of social protection services have caused an imbalance in the tasks of social reproduction in households. These factors have increased the demand for care within families and reduced the number of people available to provide it. In Europe and the United States, this problem was “solved” by “importing” female migrant labor.

Several studies have analyzed this mechanism and made visible the structural and androcentric inequalities in how care is socially organized internationally. ³⁶ Their critical focus is mainly on the system of exploitation of migrant women from the global South, who leave their families in the care of other women and take on the reproductive work that the local women in countries of destination are unable to sustain. In both areas (origin and destination), there is no reorganization of the division of reproductive labor between genders. Nor is there a cross-cutting debate on the state's responsibility to guarantee care as a public good. Thus, the chains are also the result of the structural persistence of patriarchal female domestic reproductive overload that interconnects core and periphery countries of capitalism.

The debate on the circulation of care ³⁷ seeks to remedy some aspects not addressed by the chain perspective. It draws on Bryceson and Vuorela's ³⁸ definition of transnational family, seeking to understand how people establish kinship ties and maintain their sense of belonging over time, between societies with different cultural configurations, and beyond geographical distance. ³⁹ Their emphasis is on “the reciprocal, multi-directional and asymmetrical exchange of care that fluctuates over the life course within transnational family networks subject to the political, economic, cultural, and social context of both sending and receiving societies.” ⁴⁰

The concept of care acquires nuances in both proposals. Global care chains give visibility to the paid/unpaid work dyad ⁴¹ and establish a multi-scale perspective (connecting geopolitical economic and labor processes). However, some authors consider this view basically dyadic. ⁴² The notion of circulation of care proposes to overcome this limitation “to capture all the actors involved in family life as well as the full extent of their care activity, including practical, emotional and symbolic, that defines their membership in a family.” ⁴³ In this line, and supported by Finch, ⁴⁴ care is defined as multidimensional (articulating personal, financial, practical, emotional, and infrastructural aspects) and multifaceted. ⁴⁵

Both perspectives have been criticized. Gregorio ⁴⁶ points out the need to incorporate the historical economic-political relations of production and the subjective and identity dimensions into the analysis of care chains. This would make it possible to decentralize the emphasis on the supposed conflict between “professional women from the First World” or “white women” versus “immigrant women from the Third World” or “black or colored immigrants.” ⁴⁷ Escrivá ⁴⁸ criticizes the excessively commodified view of care, which reduces it to a remunerated function, ignoring the fact that care is not always provided in exchange for wages, and proposes “to differentiate between formal and informal care with its nuances, too.” ⁴⁹ Yeates, Tronto, Gregorio, and Parella ⁵⁰ point out the excessive prominence given to the care relationship between mothers and children over other bonds. Yeates, Kofman, and Raghuram ⁵¹ draw attention to the encapsulation of this approach to certain regions and the need to consider gender and ethnicity inequalities reproduced in other geographic spaces.

The proposal for the circulation of care was also problematized. Tronto ⁵² highlights that the metaphor of circulation naturalizes mobility and ignores the disenfranchisement experienced by some transnational families. Hongdagneu-Sotelo ⁵³ points out that the circulation perspective lacks: (1) the understanding of care as an embodied and racialized dynamic, diverting the excessive emphasis on immaterial aspects; (2) attention to the concrete and contextualized practices of care, overcoming the focus on fluidity and deterritorialization, and (3) the deepening of self-care practices of caregivers, overcoming victimhood perspectives. ⁵⁴

Migration studies in Latin America have started to use the concepts of global care chains since the noughties. Although some of the interpretative biases of the global North were initially repeated, several ideas were gradually reformulated based on regional contextualized analysis. ⁵⁵ Thus, the specificity of South-South and South-North mobilities was problematized. ⁵⁶ The analysis of the circulation of care was then introduced with transnational families and transborder mobilities as protagonists.

In Chile, within whose borders our case study is located, global care chains were used to analyze transnational migrations to the country's cities. ⁵⁷ The circulation of care approach is used in studies in border territories (especially in northern Chile) to investigate the mobility dynamics of women whose locality of origin is relatively close to where they work. ⁵⁸ In this field, Leiva and Ross, ⁵⁹ Leiva, Mansilla, and Comelin, ⁶⁰ and Garcés-Estrada, Leiva, and Comelin ⁶¹ focus their study on the transborder circularity of Bolivian women inserted in paid domestic work.

In other Latin American border areas, researchers propose to rethink the care chains. For example, López ⁶² investigated transborder work in the labor trajectories of Mexican women inserted in the care work of children and older people in San Diego (the United States), while living in Tijuana (Mexico). She introduced the concept of transborder care trajectories, alluding to female itineraries that involve commuting to work in San Diego, but residing, studying, and even sustaining another productive activity in Tijuana. In this framework, care is understood solely “as the remunerated provision of personal services for the care of children and seniors and/or patients in the employer's home.” ⁶³ The research on the dimension of care that transborder women carry out in their own families is still pending.

In previous studies, we proposed to approach this last aspect by analyzing the female experience on the Paraná Triple-border (between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay). ⁶⁴ We noted that women articulate transborder mobilities as a care chain that, despite its similarity with those constituted by long-distance transnational migrants, has other characteristics, namely greater flexibility, and informality of ties (labor, among others) and greater intensity in the crossings between national spaces. ⁶⁵ Thus, we proposed to name these chains as transborder care circuits, assuming that they are a female response to the global articulation of the exploitative neoliberal dynamics. ⁶⁶

“Striving” and “Self-Sacrificing”

In our ethnographic fieldwork in Arica, we collected expressions used by social actors to describe Bolivian Aymara women among them: “hard-working,” “self-sacrificing,” “strong,” “fighters,” and “striving.” Similar adjectivizations were found in migratory contexts in Argentina, ⁷⁹ Spain, ⁸⁰ other localities in northern Chile, ⁸¹ and in Bolivia. ⁸²

These representations are supported by a broader imaginary, according to which these women bear a heavy burden of productive work and that, in Arica, they do so in three priority fields: agriculture, pastoralism, and commerce. However, they also state that they do not receive social recognition for their work and abilities. Consequently, the characteristics that could configure female empowerment (“fighters” and “strong”) contradictorily coincide with statements about their subordinate place in family, community, and social terms (“self-sacrificing” and “without recognition”).

The female migrants agree with these statements that place them, contradictorily, between agency and subordination. Of the thirty interviewees, seventeen emphasized these characteristics and were proud of them. When we asked them how you could describe “Bolivian Aymara women,” their answers used the descriptions used by Arica's population: “Bolivian women only work. We are always working; we work sunrise to sunset. We wash clothes, cook, work” (Rosi, September 11, 2019). Or even: “the thing is, women are harder workers than men, and men just follow women. But it's women who lead the way” (MMQ, September 19, 2019). These comments illustrate the complex character of the women's relationship with work: “they always have to work” (an inescapable mandate), but they also build a certain position of moral authority based on this circumstance. Not all their work experience is subordination, but it would be inaccurate to consider their intense activity as an “empowerment.” The women pay a high price (in terms of work hours in different spheres) to maintain this “lead,” and they do not always manage to do so.

The adjectivizations linked to daily work make up a central symbolic nucleus for the migrants interviewed, intersectionally articulating identity representations about their gender, nationality, and ethnic condition. The ethnic dimension of these imaginaries alludes to the fact that the female practice of self-sacrificing labor is part of the gender division of labor in their Aymara families of origin. In turn, this articulates with religious symbolism, the institutionalization of social ties and alliances, the organization of economic production and circulation, and the conformation of community power hierarchies. ⁸³ The women are understood as being “integrally responsible” for the care of the nuclear family. The mothers of our interviewees involved their daughters from a very early age in domestic and sibling care tasks to reconcile their productive activities with this responsibility. Thus, a care chain is assembled relieving the load of older women by transferring it to their descendants. This transfer allowed the mobility of the interviewees’ mothers from indigenous villages to the cities of Bolivia, while reproducing the place of female subordination that was naturalized among their daughters:

Yes, because when [her mother and older sister] were in La Paz, I looked after my brothers [in the indigenous village of origin]. Because I was the only girl in my grandmother's house where we lived, I was the only women. My two uncles, male cousins, and also my brothers lived there, and I was the only girl (EH, September 16, 2019).

And also in Arica's productive valleys:

My sister came here earlier [to Azapa], and so I did everything, I cooked. Yes, the thing is my mum always came to work here [to Azapa] with my sister. So, I was left in charge [in the indigenous village in Bolivia], cooking for my siblings because they were still at school (Maite, September 18, 2019).

This is not a minor point. The chain of care transfer has constituted the possibilities of transborder mobilities for several generations. The articulation of transfer systems and female mutual support in their Aymara families predates the globalization process that made this model of globalized care chains a generalized phenomenon in female Latin American migration. Several female authors investigating the productive organization of Indigenous families in Bolivia (particularly in rural areas) found these patterns of overload naturalized. ⁸⁴ Indeed, that is transparent in the two previous testimonies, in which the “girls” (to use EH's words) must take care of all the male members without involving them in any way in the domestic chores. In the women's narratives, this construction of their family mandates that pushes them to a “multiple presence” is transparent. From an early age, they had to know how to work the fields (like the men), but they also had to take charge of domestic chores alone (cooking, cleaning, washing, housekeeping, caring). Mothers instilled these responsibilities, transmitting the “necessary” knowledge to their daughters.

My mum would say to me: “The men have to go to college. You are a woman, you are going to have a husband and you’re not going to study; they finish at secondary school [women], and go straight to where their husbands are.” That's what my mum said to me. To be honest, she would never have supported me [to study]. [If I had done it] I wouldn't be here now. My mum has never supported me. “Frist, you have to cook the food, if you want to go to school get up at five in the morning to cook lunch” (Rosi, September 11, 2019).

We see a double dimension of the feminine mandate. First, “knowing how to work” allows women to occupy a specific place in the communal division of labor, being morally recognized for this. Diana indicates, for example, that her community recognizes her as a woman who is not “lazy,” she is “honest.” Thus, being able to work is a central aspect in considering a woman a whole person after her passage to adulthood with an Aymara marriage. ⁸⁵

Second, as Rosi points out, these mandates make it impossible for them to plan futures free from female overload. Here, the boundary that gender implies (as an assignment of a specific locus in the community, an indication of a set of family and collective functions) is established from an ethnic-community notion. It endows the women with gender identity while contradictorily enclosing their possibilities in the relationship with the male gender. Thus “gender boundaries” construct ways of outlining possible and restricted universes for each person. However, these outlines are not random: their validity points to the reproduction of male power.

There Is No Rest for Women

We identified that productive and reproductive overloads structured our interviewees’ everyday experiences. In Maira's words:

There is no rest for women. Because when we rest from work, there's a lot to do at home: laundry, all the work a house implies […]. I have to wash my babies; I have to bathe them. If I don't teach them, she also complains, she says: “Mum, you didn't teach, and I didn't do well in the test” (Maira, September 18, 2019. Emphasis added).

In total, 19 women are the main—if not only—providers of productive work in their homes. In addition, the women, be they single, married, separated, or in a civil union, all stated that they were the primary provider of social reproduction tasks in their homes:

I was the only one who had to work; he [her ex-husband] never lifted a finger to help. He was always out working. I worked too. I always had to worry about the babies, not him. It was as if he didn't have children. I asked him for money, only for the children, but he didn't give me any. He would say to me: “What do you want it for? I’m not a millionaire.” And we were always fighting. And he had no affection for my children. He hit my oldest son a lot; he would hit him, grab him. We’ve fought about my children several times. “I’m bringing up my children; you are estranged from the children,” I would say to him. Later, that's why mostly he would say, he wasn't concerned at all. “I had a meeting [at school] for the three of them the same day, I had a meeting. One day I said to him it wouldn't take one day, two, or three to go to a meeting. He told me he didn't have time. And what about drinking [alcohol]? You have time for that!” I would say. He never helped with anything. Never did laundry; he didn't help me at all. That's how it was; he only worked. Sometimes he came home drunk, causing a scandal. It was always me who had to look out for the kids: they need this, that's missing, I need to get shoes, there's always something needed for kids […]. “I work; nobody can complain about that.” That's what he would say to me. “Fine, you go your way, and I’ll go mine.” There was no point going on, he no longer helped me, and he didn't even come and see the kids, not on Father's Day, nothing (Rosi, September 11, 2019).

Rosi's story bears witness to how male figures disassociate themselves from the productive and reproductive responsibilities that women take on integrally. It shows the links between her partner's alcoholism, his absenteeism as a father, and his violence towards Rosi and the children. In their attempt to cover all the nuclear family's needs, the women are deploying their presence in more and more areas of care: “We cook, get dinner ready, change, and get the baby ready for bed, and there are the men with their arms crossed, lying down, and to top it all, they hit you” (Diana, 18.09.2019). In sum:

I think it's the women who are in more need. Despite everything, I don't want to discriminate against men, but it's the women, the mothers, [they are the ones] who work the most. They practically never get a rest. They want to see their children get ahead, they want a better life […], that your kids do better than you did. So, they have to study to get a better life. Not like how we grew up; not to be the same as us. That is really what it's about (AMQ, September 20, 2019).

We identified several fields in which the women deploy their presence as “universal caregivers,” which leaves them with a sense of being “overwhelmed.” For example, thirteen interviewees mentioned being wholly in charge of caring for their children and family members (Casimira, Rosi, Priscila, MB, Shanita, JMQ, XFP, Basilia, Jasmín, Rosa, Silvia, Maira, and Neni). Among them, four women (Priscila, JMQ, Shanita, and Jasmín) mentioned that they had no support at all (economic, emotional, and relational) from the father in bringing up children. This situation extrapolates the care towards their own children: some women are also in charge of looking after fathers, mothers, grandparents, and their siblings. As Gonzálvez ⁸⁶ mentions, they are caught in the middle of ascending and descending care.

Let us return to the women's testimonies about their participation in these fields. Regarding emotional and relational care, they express a multidimensional concern that contemplates the transformation of patterns of gender inequality. Several women assume a lifelong commitment to ensure that their daughters have emotional and economic support so that they are not obliged to be universal caregivers in adulthood. This decision implies a simultaneous dialogue with the ascendant female figures (the interviewees’ mothers), who voluntarily or involuntarily reproduced patterns of inequality in the gender division of labor in their families:

I told my daughters, and my mother too, this is what I said: “I’m not going to do that to them [her daughters]. I’ll do whatever to work. Come what may, I’m going to work and I’m going to support you as long as I live.” I told them [her daughters]: “once I’m dead, well then I won't be able to help anymore,” I’ve told them. I’m always working for them; their father hasn't even sent ten pesos from Bolivia. He went there this year; he's living with another woman, and he's never sent us anything (Rosi, September 11, 2019).

The women's relational caregiving involves protecting their children from possible violence perpetrated by male figures in their environment or their own fathers. MB, for example, was extremely distressed when she had to travel or work late because she feared her partner, the father of her children, would rape them. Then, she had to pay extra attention to the bonds woven by the father:

I always took care of them so nothing would happen to them. And if I went to school every day, it was so they wouldn't get raped, so a man wouldn't take them away. I don't know; you hear so many horror stories! That's why I was always with them; I went to pick them up. So many times, I said to them, “something could happen to your brother.” Nothing happened with my older son; something could happen. And so, I asked the two of them if anything had happened, if their father had taken them to bed. And they told me: “No, mum.” Or, if not, about his dad, I asked my youngest, “Son, dad hasn't taken you to bed or anything?” “No, mum. He was in his room sleeping, and I was in mine.” I was always worried about things like that, worried, Because I would listen, and I would say: “they can rape him” I don't know, there's no respect anymore (MB, September 17, 2019).

The women usually provided educational support to their children on their own. They attend the school meetings, get the children ready for school, take them to and pick them up from school, buy school materials, help them with homework, and even deal with and accompany them in cases of bullying. Maira (interviewed on September 18, 2019) explained that when she does not accompany her daughter with school content, she complains that she does poorly in the exams. Silvia (interviewed on September 18, 2019) said that the fathers do not want to go to school meetings because they are ashamed, given they did not have access to formal education. The women end up carrying out all these tasks with no support:

So, we can't stretch that far. To a certain extent, we’re taking the responsibility off the men. Because in my case, well look: I was the one looking after the kids when they were small, and you know having a small child is a big responsibility. Then we have the issue of school, materials, homework to check, clothes, so many things. So, with respect to the kids, it is a responsibility. We women, we start very early, at least I leave everything ready. When I had my first child, I took everything ready: I had the vehicle, and I took everything ready, and then I would take him to the nursery school while he was growing up (Shanita, September 11, 2019).

The women give almost all the health/hygiene support to the children. Many, themselves undocumented, find it difficult to access public health (or they are afraid to do so), and so they develop several strategies to heal children's illnesses and pains. Some use Aymara traditional and herbal prescriptions; others use the border-crossing logic between Bolivia and Chile. MMQ lived in the Aymara villages, among which you can find the tripartite landmark, at more than 4,000 m.a.s.l. for many years. The women sought border crossings between the three communities to take their children for their monthly check-ups (done through “medical rounds”) in each community. However, when there was no round, they turned to ancestral Aymara knowledge:

The medical round came to Visviri once a month. So, just imagine, whenever she had a pain in her little belly, I would take my little girl to Charaña [to be seen]. Once, she caught a cold and started coughing up blood. And there was no train to get back here [to Arica]. What do I do? Well, I went to ask the older people, because they are the ones who know. And they said to me: “Go to the river, bring some firewood that grows there and that will help her get better.” I went to the river because from here it's about ten minutes from the town to the river. I brought green firewood, and I made my daughter a little mate; I made her drink about three spoonfuls, and she got better, and I brought her here [to the city] to see a doctor, and she was healthy, imagine that! (MMQ, September 19, 2019).

Shopping for, preparing and cooking food, doing the laundry, clothing children, and cleaning the home are also female tasks with a high level of conciliatory effort due to productive work:

I would get up anyway at four in the morning and cook for my children; I left cooked food. And when they came back from school, they would heat it up, and I would come to work. At night-time, I arrived late: I would wash clothes until ten or eleven at night. And the same again the next day, time to get up, because that's what I had to do to get my children ahead. I had to fight; what else could I do? (JM, September 19, 2019).

Finally, the women report overseeing ascending care (of fathers, mothers, grandparents) and same-generational care, of siblings. These responsibilities are framed within the gender mandates in their families, articulating a sense of feminine duty that constitutes a strong moral obligation for the community:

Researcher: And did you continue your studies after secondary school?

Female Care Chains

The mandate to sustain ascending and descending care involves women and their relatives in transborder mobility circuits. They must move circularly between Bolivia and Chile to care for, or move the cared-for person to get attention:

I came because my dad got sick. He had pulmonary fibrosis, so since my sisters live here [in Arica], there are four of us, four sisters, and three of them have always lived here. It was only I who lived in La Paz, in Bolivia. So, I came [to Arica] out of worry about my dad, who got sick. And my sister brought my dad [to Arica]. She brought him and said: “We are four sisters and the four of us have to take care of him because he took care of us when we were girls.” And well, that's the reason I came. I had my business there [in Bolivia], I also had my stall there, so I left it there and came here to take care of my dad, to be with him. We dedicated ourselves to him, and thank God I got this job, and there I stayed (JMQ, September 19, 2019).

In Casimira's case, it was her husband's sister who came from Bolivia to help her take care of her newborn daughter, thus allowing her to sustain her productive insertion as an agricultural worker: “I had one of my husband's sisters. She came for a while because she didn't have a job there, and she came to help. And she stayed for about four months taking care of my daughter. During that time, I was able to work” (Casimira, May 8, 2019).

By combining care on both sides of the border, the women develop mobility and resource maximization strategies anchored in female support networks. Without this female transborder support, several of them would not have been able to sustain child-rearing. It is possible to establish four central female figures for the women in these care chains.

Conclusions

Our ethnographic findings lead to four main analytical conclusions. These allow us to rethink certain concepts of the debates on migration and care to facilitate their cross-cultural applicability in the Andean Triple-border region, where mobility has ethnic configurations and is led by Indigenous women.

First, to understand the meanings of transborder care ethnographically, it is important to reconstruct the gender division of labor in the women's families (of origin and current), considering it (1) as a dynamic process of change and conflict and (2) determining how the relations of production and social reproduction are configured. From this reconstruction, we saw that most of our interviewees take on multiple presence. They are responsible for ensuring the productive resources to meet the needs of their households and family members, for whom they are “universal caregivers”. The men, in turn, are involved in productive work, but their resources are not necessarily used for the family. They hand over the responsibility of family reproduction to the women (which the women fulfill without setting aside any time for leisure and putting up with gender-based violence). This confirms the persistence of patriarchal and androcentric patterns of family and community organization. However, the women are aware of the inequalities they face. They continue with them, on the one hand, because of the strength of gender mandates (and their moral weight) and their transgenerational commitment to care. On the other hand, by exercising this care—on deploying their multiple presence—, they construct their own forms of action and decision making. Care appears, contradictorily, as a structuring element of gender inequality, and a female and embodied response to this inequality.

Second, in discussing the international literature on global care chains. Our case study complements and extends these reflections by investigating the care chains that are interwoven in short-distance, transborder circuits of displacement between countries of the global South. These chains are much more dynamic than long-distance transnational ones, due (at least in part) to the spatial proximity between the places of origin and destination; this allows women to devise frequent and intense mobility strategies. Noting the sui generis nature of care chains in border areas, we propose calling them: transborder care circuits. These circuits articulate paid and unpaid, public, and private, formal and informal care. They are impacted by the configuration of neighboring border spaces and challenged by political processes (local, regional, and transnational). However, they also engender dimensions of the circulatory experience of care, moving affections and emotions, and transforming bodies and relationships.

Our study also expands the international literature by focusing specifically on the care that circulates within families and across borders, based on female mobility. Our interviewees were not inserted in paid domestic work; their caregiving is configured centrally as part of their family interactions. By focusing on this care, we were able to observe that, in the case of Aymara migrant women in the Andean Triple-border area, transborder circuits cannot be understood as a phenomenon created by the globalization of the economy because their mobilities also allude to the ethnic, familial configurations of their families and communities. These configurations respond to patterns of gender inequality that are simultaneously conflictive and orderly, tense and peaceful, shifting and persistent. This is linked to how their families construct unequal patterns of succession and gender division of reproductive work, and the moral obligation of care they sustain in these familial logics. Thus, our study points out the need to understand these female mobilities as a historical phenomenon, but also as part of ethnic kinship structures that have not been sufficiently considered in the international literature.

Third, the women's mobility poses challenges to the protection of families. Transborder care circuits are a response to these challenges. In these circuits, the women weave multiple resources, articulating social, cultural, and political networks (both family and community), seeking to meet the care demands of their dependents. To this end, they rely mainly on each other, establishing female cooperation links that mix hierarchical and horizontal ties of a transgenerational and transborder nature. These circuits are built based on gender, generational, and ethnic asymmetries, which have an impact on care arrangements within families. Our findings make it possible to establish: (1) the multidimensional and multifaceted nature of the resources that circulate in transborder chains; (2) the multiscale dimension of care; and (3) the women's capacity for agency in adapting their resources situationally and contextually to meet specific care needs. They also show that (4) these resources have an inescapable transborder imprint, given that the women operate them by maximizing the differences in the strength (economic, social, cultural, and symbolic) of their knowledge, ties, and work in the different national territories.

Fourth, we suggest a dialectical ethnographic approach to these phenomena. The women reproduce and resist (contradictorily) gender inequalities through transborder care circuits: these dimensions of their experiences are inseparable. Thus, female mobilities must be understood as historized and situated, as contingency and transcendence, and as reproduction and rupture. As a female agency that, contradictorily, is framed by kinship structures and gender mandates, Bolivian Aymara migrant women experience the intersectional articulation of borders and gender boundaries. This raises the need to give analytical centrality to care and female multiple presence in the research of transborder mobilities.